[vlc-devel] STOP! Think. Act... (was Re: Formal complaint - censorship)

[Yuval Levy]

Hey guys,

this looks ugly, is getting uglier, and guess who is winning and who is losing 
here?

1.   It's a fact that Apple and copyleft are like oil and water.  They don't 
mix well. The App Store's terms are incompatible with GPLv2 (additional 
distribution restrictions).


2.  Rémi's PR backfired.  Optimal would have been to ask Apple to comply with 
the GPL and let them sort out how.  Publish the request and Apple's answer and 
let the public judge Apple by its own action.  Not to request negative action 
and blurt about it in public.


3.  From a Public Relations perspective it makes sense to temporarily suspend 
the planet and iron out the differences *in private*.  Not to wait for the 
problem to spill out on a public mailing list.  To add an "opinions expressed 
hereafter" blah blah exacerbates the conflict. 

*Have you tried to contact Rémi before he posted here?  YES or NO?*


4.  All the insults at Richard (J) Stallman's and Steve (M) Jobs' followers do 
not help  VLC.  I hope that most people here are agnostic or tolerant enough 
to recognize that the cone rules here, not the forbidden fruit or the African 
bovine.  Karma over dogma.  Stop trading insults over such a silly dispute.

5.  The dispute ("censorship") is silly.  The underlying cause (license 
infringement) is not.  There may be good reasons to be tolerant of grey zones.  
Or not.  Pull yourself together.  List the pros and cons for tolerating a grey 
zone in the case of the App Store.  Make a common decision and act 
accordingly.  As a team, not as individuals.  Fix the ugly PR.  Fix the 
temporary suspension of the planet.  Get back to be the heroes coding on the 
best media player in the world.

If you want my personal opinion on the issue and how to fix it, let me know.  
For now I keep my two cents for myself because I don't consider myself 
important enough to your community.  I'm just a user who loves VLC.

So:
1. list the pros and cons of living with the App Store vs. GPL gray zone
2. decide if you can live with it or not
3. act upon it
4. fix the pr
5. fix the planet
6. live long and prosper

Yuv


On October 26, 2010 02:10:10 pm Christophe Mutricy wrote:
> > This is a formal complaint against whoever unilaterally decided to take
> > my RSS feed out
> 
> Which is not the case: http://www.remlab.net/feed.xml still works from
> here
> 
> > and then shut down planet.videolan.org
> 
> For this one yes
> 
> > This is called censorship.
> 
> Abusing VideoLAN's ressources to distribute blog post in the form of
> Press Release is not really nice either. Non-tech people will fail to
> not the planet part of the URL and have certainly no clue about
> aggregation. They will fail to understand that it is your personal
> actions and opinions.
> 
> I initially wanted to add a "opinions expressed hereafter are not
> necessarly VideoLAN opinions" kind of text (hopefully will less
> legalese) but it was defeated by my lack of templating skill at 11pm.
> 
> Regards,
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